


Sorrow Found Me When I Was Young

by Morcai



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, M/M, just ask Grantaire, random bits of french, reincarnation sucks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morcai/pseuds/Morcai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire has never been able to resist eloquent blond boys with Causes</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue, Part One: The Barricade Falls

This is what happens, as succinctly as Grantaire can tell it: the barricade falls.

The barricade falls and Les Amis fall with it, until Enjolras is the only one who remains, and Grantaire finds him in the silence before his execution, as beautiful here, in defeat, as he was the day before, reckless with hope. And Grantaire asked, offered himself as an escort to the underworld and was accepted, and they faced the firing squad together.

The problem is, Grantaire does not die. He is shot, _bien sûr_ , facing down the National Guard, how could he not?

But hours later he wakes, his wound tended by Madame Hucheloup, and he could almost weep in self-pity.

_“Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of living, and of dying.”_

Enjolras was right.

Grantaire leaves, without speaking to Madame Hucheloup, as soon as he can stand on his own feet, and makes his way back to his rooms, stopping only to buy paints and a truly prodigious amount of alcohol.

He only decides what to do with them when he reaches his rooms and there is the beginnings of a painting—Courfeyac’s friend Marius, whose being, possessed by love, had demanded Grantaire’s attention. Marius is now dead, but at the least Grantaire can do, incapable as he is of dying properly, is immortalize him as the young man in love that he knew.

After Marius, he finds himself painting Feuilly, and time wings by him, marked only by the number of bottles he empties, the times he passes out from exhaustion, and he ignores it all, feverishly immortalizing Les Amis de l’ABC in the only way he can. After Feuilly, rendered with book in one deft hand and the other gesturing, as if he spoke on a topic of great passion, he paints Bahorel, always quick to laugh and to fight, fierce and jovial.

The others follow as quickly as he can prepare canvases and commit their likenesses. Combeferre, pausing in the act of sketching a moth, the glint of good humor in his eyes; Jehan, with a flower pinned to his waistcoat and melancholy in the line of his mouth, badly dressed as always; ferocious Gavroche, a blur of devilish charm; Courfeyrac, saluting a good pun; Joly and Bossuet, their images two halves of the same, though on separate canvases. And of course, last and most desperately captured, Enjolras.

Enjolras, implacable, beautiful, lit by the sun and unflinching, scarlet flag clenched in one raised fist.

(Grantaire can feel the echo of the other hand’s grasp on the hand he paints with. Sometimes it steadies his hand, at others it makes him tremble)

He has been weakening as he paints, though his brushstrokes have remained, for the most part, even.

And once he is finished with Enjolras’ portrait, he stumbles into his bed, and the fever he has been ignoring pounces. He wakes three times and, each time, upon seeing the portraits of the young men who had been his friends, he weeps.

He finally breathes his last two days after he finishes the last portrait, surrounded by smell of drying oil paint and uncounted empty bottles.

 

 

\---------------------------------------

(The paintings will be discovered by his landlady, who grows impatient with him not paying his rent. He will be buried in a pauper’s grave. It will be, in a curious twist of fate, close to where the rebellious students of only a few weeks ago were buried.

Grantaire’s landlady will sell the paintings, and they will change hands four more times before one of them catches the eye of Monsieur Guillenormand, for it looks strikingly like his grandson, when Marius is alight upon seeing Cosette.

He will buy the entire set of portraits and gift them to Marius and Cosette for their wedding.

He will not understand why Marius bursts into tears at the sight of them, each one framed to match the subject matter. He will not understand why Marius asks if there is a twelfth painting.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bien sûr=of course


	2. Prologue, Part Two: Duality

Being reborn is a strange state of affairs, Grantaire finds, seven years old and ignoring the book he is supposed to be reading along with the class in. He vastly prefers to sit in the back of the room, reconstructing some of Enjolras’ more interesting speeches. There is a certain amount of difference between French and English, of course, but not enough that he finds these classes worth more than the most cursory attention.

The duality doesn’t stop being strange as the years wear on. When he stares at his math homework in incomprehension some nights, wondering whose goddamned idea it was to put letters in math, he expects the same tirades from his father that he heard the first time around. It never fails to surprise him when they spend hours working through the problems together instead, in spite of the fact that he knows his mild-mannered present-day father is nothing like the scornful, angry factory foreman of before.

With his mother it’s less difficult, but the smiles and the sweet voice and the music that fills the house so much of the time is sometimes disorienting.

And it’s not just his family that’s strange. Sometimes the differences between the time he died in and the time he lives in confuse him and he has to think very carefully before he speaks, lest he accidentally slip into French.

Still, it’s not all bad. He’s not well-liked in school—too smart, incapable of keeping his mouth shut and his head down, indefinably odd—but it’s hard to care about that when some days he finds himself reading Rosseau because it reminds him of sitting in the back of the Musain, arguing with Enjolras. Besides, he’s heard worse insults than middle schoolers can come up with.

His grades are good, for all that he’s bad at paying attention in class, and after the first time he breaks down in an art class (fifth grade, when it was mandatory, and the red paint that had spilled on the table looked like blood and the smell of even those washable paints had reminded him too much of frantic strokes of a paintbrush and trying to immortalize the way Joly’s nose wrinkled when he was waiting for the chance to use a good pun) he is excused from them and takes music classes instead.

Applying for college is surreal, but no one has ever accused Grantaire of not being able to string words together well, and with some help from one of his teachers to keep his essay on-topic, he ends up being accepted to every school he tries for.

But he’s seventeen and still leaning on the memories of men who died almost two hundred years ago to shield him, sometimes, from the taunts of people who he sometimes feels decades older than. When he announces his plan to take a gap year and spend it wandering Europe, his parents wonder why, but they support him in it, and so he starts his journey in Italy, only a few days after graduation.

He does his best to avoid France, but only manages three or four months before his feet turn to the country he has always, in his heart, called home. His French is, at first, laughably outdated and he passes himself off as having no knowledge of the tongue. It only takes him a month or two though, to catch up on the two centuries of evolution, French has always been the language of his thoughts, after all, and immersion is the fastest way to learn a language.

If he cannot stop himself from coming home, he can stop himself from coming _home_ well enough. He spends half a year wandering, occasionally visiting England and Spain, but mostly working odd jobs and staying in youth hostels, living out of his backpack and making sure to always, always detour widely around Paris.

He drinks and smokes and laughs and on June fourth, Grantaire enters Paris for the first time in this life and the city he will always love, the city that killed him once, the city he fell in love for the first and only time in, and Paris, incomparable, beautiful Paris, welcomes him home.

On the first day, he wanders Paris, since he has nowhere to be, and he notices what has changed and what has stayed the same, and he has no troubles with the streets once he reaches the old parts of Paris, the parts that have changed little over the last two hundred years. He breathes, and he buys coffee at a small cafe and drinks it while he watches the world go by.

He wastes an hour at the cafe, before he pays and leaves, walking the streets, noting where the Musain had once been and where there was now a small bookshop.

He finds a youth hostel, after wandering the city for several more hours, and he sleeps easily, lulled by city sounds so familiar to him, a child of a city far away and the city around him, and when he wakes he does not remember his dreams.

Late the next morning he leaves the hostel and walks Paris until, early in the afternoon, he finds where he guesses the barricade was erected. It’s the best he’ll get, wherever his friends were buried, so long ago, has likely been built over since.

So he leans against the wall, and he looks over the street, and he sings his farewells. He will never forget these men, who made his first life worth living, but he is making peace with them. After this, they will not need to haunt him.

“ _Of all the money that e’er I had_ ,” he sings, quietly, “ _I’ve spent it in good company_.”

The song is not a perfect choice, but it’s the only one he has, and while before he was a child of France, through and through, in this life he is only French in some small degree, while his grandmother still has her Irish accent, after decades of living in the United States.

So he sings, and he remembers them. Joly, Jolllly, always good humored, and Bossuet, with ready wit and terrible luck, always at his side. Prouvaire, melancholic and fierce, Feuilly, likely the most widely read of them all. Bahorel, who knew half of Paris and attended his classes as much out of spite as to learn, and Gavroche who knew Paris’ streets best and neither respected nor feared anyone, and Courfeyrac with his radiant affection and laughing eyes, and Combeferre with his sly humor and his wide-ranging interests.

And Enjolras, always, always Enjolras, strong-minded, idealistic Enjolras, who faced death so fearlessly.

They are as clear in his mind as if he had spoken to them only yesterday, but they are all nearly two centuries dead and gone, and it is time, after nineteen years of clinging to their memories against his nightmares, that he lets them sleep.

“ _Good night, and joy be with you all_.”

The last note lingers only a few moments before he looks up and down this street, without even a plaque to mark it as a place where good men, brave men died for what they believed was right, and walks away.

He has plane tickets to buy, university to attend, a new life to live.

Whatever the cause of his rebirth, memories intact, he feels that it is his responsibility to live this life better than the last. Perhaps, if he does meet his friends again, once this second life of his is ended, he will be able to say, and mean it, that he has made up for not being able to die with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Grantaire sings in this chapter is Ed Sheeran's "The Parting Glass" which can be found [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kVVn80pFOc)
> 
>  _I_ can be found on [tumblr](www.spookietaire.tumblr.com)
> 
> Note: The next bit is going to take a while; the journal that's got the plot outline has to be mailed to me so I don't write myself into a corner. As soon as that gets here, I'll get to work on the next part.


End file.
